Anhinga

Dottie and I went to Circle B Bar Reserve in Polk County, Florida on Friday morning. I happened on this Anhinga trying to swallow a catfish. Just before this image was captured the bird dropped the fish back into the water. Quickly following the fish into the water it soon emerged with the fish speared by it's bill. The heavy tree canopy put the bird in shade, so I had to drop the shutter speed and add light for a correct exposure. Comments and critique welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for viewing.

Nikon D7000
Nikon 80-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VRII AF-S ED shot at 400mm (600mm FFE)
1/400 F/5.6 Matrix Metering +1 EV ISO 3200 AWB, camera supported by a monopod
Post processed in Lightroom 6 and Photoshop Elements 10, cleaned up a couple areas in the background
Cropped for composition and presentation

Nice action shot, well captured, Joe. You might want to do a little more noise reduction on the background only.

Hi Joe, the colour of the subject looks way off, quite blue and not sharp, you may wish to revisit and repost?

Karl and Steve, thank you for viewing and commenting.

Steve, my guess would be the deep shadow, difficult focusing for my camera and a lot of blue light. I gave it a try, chock it up as a learning experience. I appreciate your insight guiding me to what can be done and what cannot be done. If not for the fish I would have passed it by.

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I appreciate your insight guiding me to what can be done and what cannot be done.

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Joe, if you can fire off the RAW via the usual route I will take a look. If you can do it sooner rather than later that would be good, as I'm packing for a flight tomorrow, early am.

Cheers

Hi Joe, thats a fair size catch for the Anhinga - tell me he managed to swallow that down the hatch. I agree with Steve regarding thecast. Desaturating the blue channel in saturation, with get the colour looking more natural back to the blacks they are. With regards to sharpening, wet plumage is always difficult to achieve a 'sharp' result.

Hi Joe,
The IQ is not up to your usual standard. Details seem coarse and I think you needed more DOF.
Blue cast already mentioned.
I like the little bits of vegetation on the neck and wings, especially the little bit on the neck.
I think takinthis image back to the drawing board will yield a very nice result,
Gail

The scene you stumbles upon is quite dramatic - I don't think anyone of us would have resisted pressing the shutter button even with those difficult conditions! Composition and exposure are spot on, and the splattered duckweed on the Anhinga's face is neat. It's just the fine detail that is not quite there.

Thanks everyone for viewing, commenting, and offering encouragement and suggestions for improving the image. Rather than trying to fix/improve the image as posted I went back to the original, starting from the beginning to work up the image. Less noise reduction which I think was blurring the fine detail. I also found a few grey pixels that were close to neutral grey, using them and the eyedropper in Lightroom I set the white balance. Working slowly and being more careful here is the post of that post processing.

Nice catch. :)

the repost takes care of the blue cast but the image is still soft and noisy. My suspension is that RAW wasn't sharp. if that's the case you can't do much about it.

impressive scene with the huge fish and its mouth open! bummer the shot didn't come out as good as it could.

TFS